For those of you who don’t read Kotaku, here’s the link to the article. In short, Hearst Publications Group, which owns UGO, has bought the 1up Network from Ziff Davis. They then canceled EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly, their only and flagship gaming magazine) canceled just about all of their podcasts, and then fired most of the staff, including James Mielke (I can’t believe I spelled that right), Shane Bettenhausen, Skip Pfister, Ryan O’Donnell, among 30 other staffers and the GameVideos team, in a purge that I might call, and will call, Stalin-esque.

Aside from the tragedy of Vampire William Randolph Hearst draining the life blood out of the 1up network, leaving only a lifeless husk, hopefully there will be a lesson to be learned from this, but a costly one. You see, people in the business of reviewing film and reviewing video games like to talk about how different reviewing games and reviewing movies are, but they actually have a great deal in common, in certain respects.

What you write has to be entertaining to read. Unlike in actual news journalism, where even if you’re letting your opinion slip through the cracks you still have to retain the illusion of detachment, as a reviewer you’re (presumably) getting paid to write your (presumably) knowledgeable opinion. Because you’re allowed to be opinionated, you have to distinguish yourself from all the other opinionated reviewers, and you do this by not only saying “The Godfather is good,” you have to say how good you think it is, and you do it through adjectives – even if you personally assign a numerical score to the review, you still use adjectives and other descriptive words to back up that score.

You probably already know this. Presumably the people with Hearst Publications and UGO already know this. However, there’s one more extremely important bit that comes after you’ve written more reviews – you write more reviews.

Wait, come back, I’m not done yet!

Once you’ve written more reviews, you establish to your readers what your taste in film, music, games, comics, food, whatever is. This is extremely important. Scratch that. It’s vital. It’s as essential as oxygen. People have different tastes in film, music, games, comics, food, etc. Consequently, while one movie or game may get panned by critics, it can still get a following or do well anyway. The perfect examples (for better or worse) are the Dynasty Warriors Franchise and Weird Al’s film UHF. The Dynasty Warriors games have only really had incremental alterations ever since Dynasty Warriors 2 changed the franchise from a fighting game with historical figures to a mass beat-em-up and have been repeatedly critically panned for it. UHF ended up in the worst possible weekend for films (up against, among other films, ET and Batman), failed horribly upon release, but thanks to television, video and now DVD got a cult following. So, consequently, people looking for movie reviews will look for a critic they can trust, whose taste meshes with their own.

This is where things get big. Because once you’ve got a critic who you can trust, you “know” what to go spend your money on. Because if the big named critics (Ebert, Moore, etc.) give a thumbs down to movies that you love, why would you bother listening to them, except to go see movies that they hate (which is tempting fate if they hated UHF, and then you go see Battlefield Earth for the same reason and end up failing a sanity check. Or, in the case of Video Games, you ignore Yahtzee because he hates JRPGs (or, for that matter, just about everything coming out of Japan) and consequently end up playing Haze or Clive Barker’s Jericho because he hated it therefore it must be good. So, instead, you find a critic (like, in my case, Mike Russell) who fits with your tastes. Or, on occasion, you’ll find critics who mesh with your tastes (more or less) which is even better. But, if you’re critic of choice is fired, you’re now stuck with a tough decision – find a new one, or hope he finds a new outlet for his impulse to review stuff and follow him there.

Sometimes you get lucky and they either get hired on to a new job or start their own – such as Jeff Gerstmann and Giant Bomb or Nestor Ramos going to 1up. But sometimes you’re unlucky and the reviewer is no longer in a position to review (like Alex Navarro going to work for Harmonix), so you now have to find a new critic. If you’re lucky, you’ve already found one – I’d already started frequenting 1up right before Gerstmann-Gate, so I just took my loyalties there. Now I’ve got another choice on my hands. Stick with 1up and hope that the quality remains with the reviewers I trust gone? Or, do I stick with the new sources I found for good reviews, Kotaku, Joystiq, GameTrailers, and to a certain extent, the forum threads at RPG.net, and leave 1up.com behind? I think I’ve found my solution.

Which one will you choose?

If you read Slashdot.org, you may have caught this news story. In short, Nielsen Media Research sent a DMCA takedown order to Wikipedia, asking them to takedown a series of catagory boxes and templates for organizing radio and TV stations by city, stating that it infringed on their copyright on the practice of organizing television and radio stations by market. Consequently, the Wikipedia foundation was forced to delete all the relevant templates, leaving the userbase scrambling to find a way to organize media articles without getting sued.

To be frank, the actions of Neilsen Media Research are a crock of bullshit. The copyright in question is no better, and in fact is almost worse then some of the bogus submarine patents that you read about weekly, and the copyright in question essentially gives the Nielsen essentially a monopoly on the classification and organization of broadcast stations by geography.

As background, here’s the chain of events, according to what information has come out of Wikipedia at the moment – the Wikipedia Foundation’s lawyer, Mike Godwin, is currently out of the office and hasn’t had a chance to weigh in yet. So, what I have gotten has been from the discussion at Wikipedia on the deletion itself, and on the talk page for admistrator MBisanz.

Yesterday, the Wikipedia foundation was served a DMCA Takedown Notice by Nielsen Media Reaserch, asking them to take down over 300 templates and catagory pages. The justification for the takedown was that they infringed on NMR’s copyright on classification of stations by market, by broadcast type, etc. Specifically, according to MBisanz the method that they own the copyright on is dividing stations by, for example, the Portland-metro area, and then breaking those stations down by what broadcast type they use (Digital or standard, or cable only) as well as by outlying areas (Salem, the coast, etc.)

This copyright, if MBisanz’s description is accurate, makes it impossible to create any sort of template or classification or catagorization of stations by area, even if that list uses publically available information obtained from the FCC or even by the simple “research” of turning on the TV set and flipping through channels to see what you get and writing that down, as well as going to the library and seeing what stations used to be in the area. Presumably, TV listings have this information as well, though I currently do not know if the Neilsen organization recieves royalties from local newspapers and TV Guide for the publication of the local TV listings. I am contacting the Oregonian (my local paper) for comment on this story and general information on how the TV listings are put togeather. However, in theory, creating templates to organize television stations by region and broadcast type, while not getting into the demographic information that is Nielsen’s real bread and butter, would fall into the catagory of fair use.

I have been, for the long time, of the opinion that Knowledge (which is different from Information), at the very least, should be free. This applies to street maps, bus listings and routes, laws and building codes, and what TV stations and radio stations you can listen to and watch in your city (or in a city you’re going to). This copyright takes useful knowledge, knowledge that by all rights should be publically available, knowledge that hurts no one and even helps the stations in those broadcast areas, out of the hands of the people. That’s bullshit, and it needs to be stopped.

I urge you, dear readers, to contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) and alert them to this infringement of your rights, as well as contacting your local federal senator or representive to either let them know that action can be taken (or at the very least, for a polite message saying you need to contact the FCC, FTC, or Copyright office).

I will endevour to keep an eye on this story and will post any updates (and a response from the Oregonian once I get one) as soon as possible.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the Video Games Industry has found itself facing a lot of political pressure from Washington DC, as well as the politicians of various state legislatures. The Hot Coffee controversy started a wave of game legislation against the game industry, with many states passing legislature to impede the sale of video games that contained violent content (the levels of violence being legislated against varied from state-to-state).

Rising up against this sea of foes, was the Entertainment Software Association, then lead by Doug Lowenstein. Thanks to the dues paid by member corporations, the ESA was able to file suit in multiple state courts to block the aforementioned laws, and in many cases get them declared unconstitutional. Further, as an outgrowth of the ESA’s sibling organization, the Entertainment Merchant’s Association (or EMA came the Entertainment Consumer’s organization, or ECA, lead by Hal Halpin, which sought to bring a voice for those who play video games and other electronic media, so that someone is fighting for them. Among one of the ECA’s first actions was to join with GamePolitics.com, a blog that tracked attacks against gaming in the public sector, from politicians, and from the news media.

The reason I’m bring up this melodramatic alphabet soup is that there is dissension in the ranks – specifically between the ECA, and the ESA – and the ECA didn’t start it.

For the past few months, the ESA has been hemorrhaging prominent members, both from their prominent trade show, E3, and from their rankings in general. This started after Lowenstein left the ESA, and was replaced by former Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Mike Gallagher, no relation to the stand up comic or the talk show host. ESA members became dissatisfied for Gallagher’s perceived shortcomings. Particularly, that where Lowenstein was direct in attacking critics of the game industry as soon as they opened their mouths, Gallagher remained silent – something which became particularly damning after what was known as the “Sex-Box” controversy, when on a “news program” on Fox News, pundits claimed that BioWare’s game Mass Effect contained graphic sexual content, including rape. The allegations were so clearly false, and it was made so obvious that the “pundits” on Fox’s program had not played the game, that long time game industry critic Jack Thompson spoke out in defense of Mass Effect. Gallagher, on the other hand, was silent.

In response to Gallagher’s lack of response, recently many prominent members of the ESA have withdrawn, from Lucasarts, to Id Software, to Activision/Blizzard. Furthermore, NCSoft (publishers of City of Heroes), Codemasters and Her Entertainment have dropped out of the convention, while continuing to remain members of the ESA. Now, when these announcement were made, I wasn’t sure what to think. Now, with a recent development, I’ve come to see the bigger picture, that the departures were more like the smart employees leaving before everything goes straight down the crapper.

Here’s the new development. Mid-May, Gallagher announces that Texas Governor Rick Perry would be the keynote speaker at E3. It felt like an odd fit, but Austin has long been a center of Game Development, so there may have been more there then I thought. However, then video got out that conservative minister John Hagee was a supporter of Perry and vice versa, as Perry was recorded attending several of Hagee’s sermons. This is the same John Hagee whose endorsement was rejected by Republican Nominee John McCain, after Hagee said that Adolf Hitler was engaging in God’s will through the Holocaust, through some incredibly tortured “logic” that said that Hitler’s actions encouraged Jews to return to Israel.

Yesterday, video from one of Hagee’s sermons got out where Hagee said that only Christians would go to Heaven, and all others would go to Hell. The video clearly shows Governor Perry in attendance, seated behind Hagee as he was giving the sermon. Perry later said that he agreed with Hagee’s sentiments. Thus, as the video game industry is multi-cultural, with people of various religious faiths, GamePolitics called the ESA on it.

In a calm, calculated, measured response – the ESA went what can best be described as apeshit, releasing a press statement that not only attacked GamePolitics as not being a news site, but also indirectly attacked the ECA as well.

To be blunt – The ESA has it’s head up its ass. As big name publishers are leave the ESA, their war-chest to fight anti-video game legislation decreases. Now is the time not to attack those companies that leave as being traitors, nor attacking the consumers who are your most loyal audience. Right now you want to be on very good terms with the ECA, and with the game public, because they’ll keep fighting for their own rights, even when you won’t or can’t. Unfortunately, the actions of the ESA and it’s representatives demonstrate that they just don’t care about the people who buy the games of the companies they claim to represent, and if the ESA doesn’t turn this around right-fucking-now, they will have gone from powerhouse to irrelevant in the course of 2 years.